Is it love? 4 percent of survey respondents use iPhones during sex

Don’t forget to party with your iPhone a week from Friday. Or better yet — go on a date.

The groundbreaking device turns 5 years old June 29, and many of us have loved every minute of our time together.

Why wait? (Image: Apple.com)

Maybe too much.

There are few better ways to get spontaneous publicity for your company than to share the results of a timely, techy and preferably sexy survey. That’s exactly what Gazelle, a sales site for used electronics, has done.

Ready for the highlights?

According to Gazelle’s survey of 1,000 customers who have traded in at least one iPhone, 15 percent of respondents would rather give up sex for a weekend than go without using their iPhone. And get this: Four percent of respondents admitted to using their iPhones during sex, the subject of some of the more incredulous tweets of the day.

What? How does that work? Never mind. Don’t want to know.

The survey has a few other goodies — 85 percent of survey respondents say they use their iPhone in the bathroom (guilty as charged) — but it’s the lovey-dovey stuff that really grabs me. I tend to think of my iPhone devotion as an addiction, sometimes a dangerous one, but there’s a good case to be made that it’s better described as love.

Brand strategist Martin Lindstrom conducted an experiment last year to see if he could tell the difference. He observed the brain patterns of 16 subjects when they either heard a ringing iPhone or saw one. In both cases, subjects’ brains “heard” the iPhone when they really just saw it, and visualized the iPhone when they really just heard it. What was more striking, the researchers saw lots of activity in the subjects’ insular cortex, a region of the brain associated with feelings of affection.

“The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member,” Lindstrom wrote in the New York Times. “In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.”

If you’re looking for a good spot for next Friday, romantic, not too expensive, may I recommend Voila on Madison Street? C’est magnifique. And its patio’s open, for more guiltless screen scrolling.